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Friday, March 27, 2015

Prince Charles has a new obsession - Defender of the Eastern faith

Who is the most formidable defender of persecuted Christians in
the world today? Many would nominate Pope Francis, who has offered
thunderous denunciations of attacks on the faithful ever since his
election. But another candidate is emerging: the surprising figure of
the future king of England.

The media have barely noticed that the Prince of Wales has a new
obsession, as powerful as his passions for architecture and the
environment: the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians. And as that
region deteriorates, this may well be the subject that dominates his
reign.

Soon after ISIS slaughtered 21 Christians on a beach in Libya, the
Coptic Church in Britain launched an appeal for the martyrs’ children.
It found an immediate high-profile backer in Prince Charles, who
contacted the Copts without any prompting (he also wrote a letter of
condolence to the Coptic Pope Tawadros II).

Bishop Angaelos, General Bishop of the Coptic Church in Britain,
says: “Prince Charles wanted to donate the money out of a sense of
solidarity and he was happy for this to be publicised to raise
awareness. It was a way of showing other people that it was all right to
support this.”

The Prince first reached out to the Copts in 2013, shortly after the
worst anti-Christian violence in Egypt in centuries. The events were
barely reported in the English-speaking press and were downplayed by the
US State Department. Copts felt deserted by their friends and
vulnerable before their enemies.

That was when the Prince’s private secretary approached Egyptian
Christians in England. The Prince then visited the Coptic Centre in the
UK, along with a Jordanian prince. There, Bishop Angaelos presented two
Coptic icons as gifts, one of St George as a present for Charles’s first
grandchild, George. “It was very sincere,” Bishop Angaelos recalls. “He
made an impromptu speech and was well informed, and he seemed to have
read up. He seemed empathetic.”

The Prince has also helped other Eastern Christians in peril. Last
September he gave a donation to Aid to the Church in Need’s campaign to
help the Iraqi and Syrian faithful. He wrote a letter to Chaldean
Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako, saying he was “heartbroken” by events in
Iraq. Again, it was the Prince who approached the charity indirectly
through mutual acquaintances. John Pontifex, ACN’s head of press, says
the Prince “feels passionately about the decline of Christianity in the
Middle East” and that “it means a great deal to him”.

Last December the Prince recorded a video address for the launch of
ACN’s Religious Freedom in the World 2014 report. This was a tremendous
coup for a Catholic charity that was launched after the Second World War
to assist the faithful living under Communism.

Charles spoke touchingly of the “mounting despair” at the situation
in the Nineveh Plains region of Iraq, where ISIS fighters had driven out
Christians, Yazidis and unorthodox Muslims. He said it was “an
indescribable tragedy that Christianity is now under such threat in the
Middle East – an area where Christians have lived for 2,000 years”, and
where people of different faiths had lived together peaceably for
centuries.

Late last year he made three visits to eastern Christian
congregations in London. In November he addressed the congregation at St
Yeghiche Armenian church in South Kensington, where he spoke of his
sorrow at the “soul-destroying tragedy” facing Christians in the Middle
East. The Prince described the faith as being “quite literally,
grotesquely and barbarously assaulted”.

In December he made two trips to congregations of Syriac speakers
whose brethren are now facing genocide in Iraq and Syria. At the
Chaldean Catholic church in Acton, he joined in the Lord’s Prayer in
Aramaic, the language of Christ, and spoke at length with the faithful.
At the nearby Syrian Orthodox church he said: “I have been deeply
distressed by the horrific scenes of violence and bestial brutality
coming out of the Middle East – where Christianity was born – including
from countries, let us remember, like Syria, to which St Paul went to
preach the Gospel and where Christians have lived peaceably with their
neighbours for nearly 2,000 years.”

He also hoped that Westerners would not “forget our brothers and
sisters whose faith is, quite literally, under fire; not to forget the
unimaginable barbarity”. “He’s very conversant with the issues,” John Pontifex says. “We’ve
been very impressed by his knowledge. He has a great deal of
understanding. He’s aware of the sensitive issues between the different
communions. His understanding is far greater than the average person
might expect.”

He adds: “In a world marked by religious illiteracy and which lacks
confidence in talking about religion, here is a figure who does get it,
and the role Christianity plays as a bridge-builder. He’s hastened the
day when you can truly say we have woken up to the reality of the
situation.”

Charles is a deeply religious man. When he ascends to the throne he
will be arguably England’s most theologically literate monarch since the
union. While his faith is not straight-down-the-line Anglicanism, it
isn’t as esoteric or wacky as the press has long made out.

Born to be supreme governor of the Church of England, Charles was
baptised in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace 30 days after his birth
by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. At university in
Cambridge he corresponded with the Anglican Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn
Stockwood, a leading liberal who spoke of “the Saviour’s oneness with
nature” and encouraged clergy to wear jeans in public.

Later Charles was influenced by the mysticism of his great mentor,
the South African writer Laurens van der Post, who encouraged the Prince
“to see the old world of the spirit”.

The Prince’s formative years gave him awide-ranging interest in
religions and what unites them. Cardinal Vincent Nichols has said that
Prince Charles seems “thoroughly at home” in Westminster Cathedral and
that “when he is abroad he happily goes to Mass, and is at peace with
that”.

Charles is also fascinated by Judaism and, especially, Islam. He
believes that “the future surely lies in rediscovering the universal
truths that dwell at the heart of [Abrahamic] religions”.

What is less well known and understood is the extent to which the
Prince feels a deep spiritual connection to Orthodox Christianity. It is
this, more than anything else, that explains why he is leading a
passionate campaign to save the eastern faithful.

Such is his closeness to the faith that many Greek Orthodox believers
think he has secretly converted. If that were true, it would pose a
huge constitutional dilemma.

But it is undoubtedly the case that Orthodoxy looms large in
Charles’s life and family history. His great-aunts Alexandra and
Elizabeth converted to Orthodoxy and are considered martyrs, murdered by
the Bolsheviks along with so many of the Prince’s blood relations in
Russia.

Prince Philip with his mother, Princess Alice of Greece, who had become an Orthodox nun

Charles’s grandmother was an Orthodox nun. Princess Alice, who
endured a number of difficulties in her life, including deafness,
schizophrenia and the Nazi occupation of her Greek homeland, is
considered a Righteous Among the Nations for her role in saving Jews
during the War. A woman of noted holiness, she founded an order of nuns
in 1949 after her husband Andrew’s death.

When Alice’s youngest child, Philip, married Princess Elizabeth of
England, he was required to join the Church of England. But he has
maintained links with the Greek Church and there have often been rumours
of his return. His mother was given a small Orthodox chapel that she
used until her death in 1969, when her remains were buried at a Russian
Orthodox convent in Jerusalem, as she had wished.

Prince Charles has always been drawn to Orthodox Christianity’s
rugged spirituality. He likes icons and reading the Greek mystics. There
are Byzantine images in The Sanctuary, the simple chapel in the grounds
of his home at Highgrove House in Gloucestershire, where he goes to
pray and meditate. At his marriage to Camilla, the Creed was recited in
Old Church Slavonic.

Charles has also received regular visits at Highgrove from Ephraim,
abbot of the ninth-century Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos. The Prince
flew to Athos a few days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, a
period of intense crisis for him, his children and the whole royal
family. Alone with Ephraim in the chamber there, Charles is rumoured to
have made a “spiritual commitment” to Orthodoxy. After one of his visits
to Mount Athos, a monk was quoted in a newspaper saying Charles was
“Orthodox in his heart”.

None of this, however, has ever been officially confirmed and should
probably be regarded sceptically. Charles’s attachment to Orthodoxy is
probably above all an expression of his desire to bring the branches of
Christianity closer together. Catherine Mayer, author of the recently
published biography Charles: The Heart of a King, says: “He thinks that
the schism was a shame. He thinks the branches of Christianity had more
in common than they appreciated.”

Mayer suggests the Prince has been campaigning on behalf of
persecuted Christians for much longer than most people realise. “It’s
been gathering pace because it’s become more urgent,” she says.

But, she adds, the media aren’t really interested and find his
comments on the environment, architecture and Islam much more appealing.
“He sees Islam as part of the same tradition as Christianity and
Judaism, and he cares about interfaith work as much as architecture and
the environment. But it’s all part of the same world view about the need
for faith. He thinks modernism is profane – it’s anti-sacred.”

For Charles, Middle Eastern Christians are a vital link between east
and west, and their destruction would make any sort of deeper
understanding impossible. As he told the Syrian Orthodox churchgoers:
“At a time when so little is held sacred, it is quite literally
diabolical that these symbolic bridges should be so destroyed.”If any single figure can help to save Middle Eastern Christianity, it
is surely the Prince. Christians in the Middle East have to rely on the
support of local Muslims and, as Mayer says, “he is respected there so
he has more clout when he says something”.

The situation has now reached a crisis point, almost a century after
the great tragedy began. Charles’s father grew up in the wake of the
First World War, a period when Bolsheviks and fascists were tearing down
the old order of which he was a part. Philip came of age after the
great genocide of Christians in the Ottoman Empire. The events of 1915
have scarred the psyche of Greeks, Armenians and Syriacs alike. Those
terrible developments are this year reaching a new and horrendous
climax.

So it is perhaps not surprising that Charles – this British prince
with a Greek heart – should see it as his role to be defender of the
Eastern faith.